Mary Miller had always been an outcast. As a young girl she had fallen into the hot burn - a torrent of warm chemical run-off from the local coal mine. Fished out white-haired and half-dead, she was initially treated with sympathy. But all that changed when the young man who pushed her died in an accident down the mines just two days later.

Now many years later she is hardly less alone. She is the mother of a bastard son, Sandy, and caught up in a faltering affair with a local schoolteacher. Both mother and son are in a desperate search for happiness, and must come to terms with the past and the dark secret from Mary's childhood. All this in the growing knowledge that their small dramas are being played out against a much larger canvas, glimpsed only in symbols and flickering images - of decay and regrowth, of fire and water - of the flood.

Fife born Donald Pirie was most recently seen on television in the BBC Scotland series River City playing Callum and in Spooks on BBC TV as PC Steven Bowyers. Theatre includes Antigone at the Old Vic, Myths of the Near Future at the Tramway, Glasgow, Macbeth at the Stephen Joseph Theatre and many others.